Of deeds, not words, and such as suit
Another manner of dispute;

870

Nor shall they be deceiv'd, unless
We're slurr'd and outed by success:
Success, the mark no mortal wit,
Or surest hand, can always hit:

880

For whatsoe'er we perpetrate,

We do but row, we're steer'd by Fate,
Which in success oft disinherits,

For spurious causes, noblest merits.

Great actions are not always true sons
Of great and mighty resolutions,
Nor do th' boldest attempts bring forth
Events still equal to their worth:

885

But sometimes fail, and in their stead

Fortune and cowardice succeed.

890

Yet we have no great cause to doubt,
Our actions still have borne us out:

Which, though they're known to be so ample,
We need not copy from example;

We're not the only persons durst
Attempt this province, nor the first.
In northern clime a val'rous knight
Did whilom kill his bear in fight,
And wound a fiddler: we have both
Of these the objects of our worth,
And equal fame and glory from
Th' attempt of victory to come.
there is a valiant Mamaluke
In foreign land, yclep'd--

'Tis

sung,

895

900

To whom we have been oft compar'd

905

For person, parts, address, and beard;

A wight bestride a commonweal;

While still the more he kick'd and spurr'd,
The less the sullen jade has stirr❜d.

NOTES

HISTORICAL, CRITICAL, & EXPLANATORY.

PART I. CANTO I.

V. 1. When civil dudgeon, &c.] To take in dudgeon is inwardly to resent some injury or affront, and what is previous to actual fury. Butler here alludes to the temple of the nation previous to the actual breaking ont of the great rebellion.

V. 2. And men fell out they knew not why.] It may justly be said they knew not why, since, as Lord Clarendon observes in his History of the Rebellion," the like peace and plenty, and universal tranquillity, was never enjoyed by any nation for ten years together, before those unhappy troubles began."

V. 3. When hard words, &c.] By hard words Butler probably means the cant phrases used by the Presbyterians and sectaries of those times; such as gospel walking, gospel preaching, soul saving, elect, saints, the godly, the predestinate, and the like, which they applied to their own preachers and themselves; and such words as papists, prelatists, malignants, reprobates, wicked, ungodly, and carnal minded, which they applied to all loyal persons, who were desirous of maintaining the established constitution in church and state; by which they infused strange fears and jealousies into the heads of the people, and made them

believe there was a formal design in the king and his ministers to deprive them of their religion and liberty. The licentiousness of the demagogues in parliament soon produced a corresponding sentiment among the people out of doors. They first raised mobs to drive the king out of his palace, and then raised regular forces to fight, as they falsely and wickedly pretended, for their religion. Among other expedients they used to inflame the minds of the people, they set them against the Common Prayer, which they made them believe was the mass book in English, and nick-named it Porridge. They enraged them likewise against the surplice, calling it a rag of popedom, the whore of Babylon's smock, and the smock of the whore of Rome.

V. 6. As for a punk.] Sir John Suckling has expressed this thought a little more decently in the tragedy of Brennoralt:

"Religion now is a young mistress here,

For which each man will fight and die atleast;
Let it alone awhile, and 'twill become

A kind of married wife, people will be

Content to live with it in quictness."

V. 8. Tho' not a man of them knew wherefore.] The greatest bigots are usually persons of the shallowest judgment, as was the case in those seditious and fanatical times, when women and the meanest mechanics became zealous sticklers for controversies which none of them could be supposed to understand. An ingenious Italian, in Queen Elizabeth's days, gave this character of the Disciplinarians, who were the Puritans' predecessors," that the common people were wiser than the wisest of his nation; for here the very women and shopkeepers were better able to judge of predestination, and what laws were fit to be made concerning church government, than what were fit to be obeyed or demolished; that they were more able (or at least thought themselves so) to raise and determine perplexed cases of conscience, than the most learned colleges in Italy; that men of slightest learning, or at Jeast the most ignorant of the common people, were

mad for a new, or a super-or re-formation of religion. And in this they appeared like that man who would never leave to whet and whet his knife till there was no steel left to make it useful."

V. 9. When. gospel trumpeter, surrounded.] Many of the Puritan soldiers were preachers, as well as military men; and in their discourses used to incite the people to rebellion, to fight, as they called it, the lord's battles, and to destroy the Amalekites root and branch, hip and thigh. By the Amalekites must be understood all that loved the king, the bishops, and the, common prayer. After the civil war actually broke out, some of of their preachers told them, that they should bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in links of iron, both of which almost literally happened. It has been fully proved, that many of the regicides were drawn into the grand rebellion by the direful imprecations of seditious preachers from the pulpit. This some of them owned, and, in particular, Dr. South tells us, "That he had it from the mouth of Axtell, the regicide, that he, with many more, went into that execrable war with such a controlling horror upon their spirits, from those public sermons, especially of Brooks and Calamy, that they verily believed they should have been accursed by God for ever, if they had not acted their part in that dismal tragedy, and heartily done the devil's work. And it was in this sense that the doctor said, “that it was the pulpit that supplied the field with swordsmen, and the parliament-house with incendiaries." Sir Roger L'Estrange, treating on the same point, says, “A trumpeter in the pulpit is the very emblem of a trumpeter in the field, and the same charge holds good against both; only the spiritual trumpeter is the most pernicious instrument of the two: for the latter serves only to rouse the courage of the soldiers, without any doctrine or application upon the text; whereas the other infuses malice over and above, and preaches death and damnation both in one, and gives the very chapter and verse for it."

V.10. With long ear'd rout, to battle sounded]